Buda Castle

Start with your feet. The paving on Castle Hill is uneven, worn smooth in places, and slightly warm when the sun has been on it. Below you, the Danube runs wide and grey-green, and the city on the far bank spreads out flat toward the horizon. Somewhere a tram bell rings across the water. Up here, the air moves a little more freely, and the noise of Budapest arrives softened, as if from another room.

You are standing on a long limestone ridge above the river. People chose this spot for one plain reason: it is easy to defend. The hill rises steeply on the river side, and from the top you can watch every boat and every road for kilometres. For more than seven centuries, kings, sultans and emperors have held this ground. Each one left something behind, and each one also destroyed part of what came before.

The story of a royal castle here begins with disaster. In 1241 and 1242, Mongol armies swept across Hungary and burned the towns on the open plain. King Béla the Fourth learned a hard lesson from the invasion. Flat, unwalled settlements could not survive another attack. So he moved people onto high ground and began fortifying this hill. A walled town grew on the ridge, and over the following generations a royal residence took shape at its southern end, where the palace still stands today.

The golden age came in the fifteenth century, under King Matthias Corvinus. Matthias was a soldier, but he was also a patron of Italian Renaissance art — the new style of classical columns, balanced proportions and humanist learning that was spreading north from Florence. He invited Italian craftsmen to his court. He also built one of the great libraries of Europe. Its illuminated manuscripts became known as the Corvinas, and scattered surviving volumes are now treasured in collections across the continent.

That Renaissance court did not last long. In 1541, the Ottoman Empire took Buda, and the city stayed under Turkish rule for about a century and a half. The palace was used as a garrison and storehouse. Then, in 1686, a Christian alliance besieged the hill and captured it after heavy fighting. The siege left the castle largely in ruins. Here is the first surprise for many visitors: almost nothing of Matthias's famous palace survives above ground. What you see now is mostly much later.

The Habsburgs, the Austrian dynasty who now ruled Hungary, rebuilt the site in the eighteenth century. Under Empress Maria Theresa, a baroque palace rose on the hill, with long symmetrical wings and tall windows. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the architects Miklós Ybl and then Alajos Hauszmann enlarged it enormously. They gave it the long river façade and the great green dome you can see from the far bank. It was meant to show that Budapest was a true imperial capital, equal to Vienna.

And then, once again, war arrived. In the winter of 1944 and 1945, Budapest was besieged during the Second World War, and German and Hungarian forces made a last stand on this hill. The palace burned. After the war, it was rebuilt, but in a simpler form, and much of the rich interior was never restored. Here is the second surprise. The destruction exposed buried medieval walls, and archaeologists were able to study and partly uncover the older royal castle beneath the modern building.

Today the palace is not a royal home. It holds museums and a library. The Hungarian National Gallery fills several wings with Hungarian painting and sculpture. The Budapest History Museum tells the story of the city and lets you walk among excavated medieval rooms. The National Széchényi Library, the country's national library, occupies the rear wing. Even if you do not go inside, it helps to know that this huge building is now a working home for art, history and books.

Now look around you for the details. Near the top of the funicular and the main gate, a great bronze bird spreads its wings on a column. This is the Turul, a mythical falcon-like bird from early Hungarian legend. According to the old tale, a Turul appeared in a dream to the ancestors of the Magyars and foretold the birth of a line of leaders. It is a national symbol, and it guards the hill like a sentry.

Walk along the western side of the palace and you will find the Matthias Fountain, a busy bronze hunting scene. King Matthias stands with his hunters, his dogs and a fallen stag. To one side sits a young woman named Ilona. Legend has it that she fell in love with the king while he was hunting in disguise, never knowing who he really was. Hungarian poets later retold her story as a quiet tragedy. Many visitors walk past without noticing her at all.

Further in, the Lions Courtyard is guarded by stone lions at its gateway. One of them is said to look angry, another calm, so take a moment to compare their faces. On the river side, the Savoy Terrace holds an equestrian statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy, a commander in the wars that drove the Ottomans out of Hungary. From that terrace, the view opens across the Chain Bridge to the Parliament building and the whole of Pest.

The palace is only one part of Castle Hill. North of it lies the old Castle District, with narrow streets, pastel houses, Matthias Church and the Fishermen's Bastion. Together with the Danube banks, this whole area was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. If you came up by the funicular, you rode a line that first opened in 1870. It was destroyed in the war and later rebuilt, and it still carries passengers up the slope in small, tilted cabins.

Before you leave, go back to the edge and look down at the river once more. Think about how many times this hill has been burned, emptied and rebuilt. The walls under your feet carry stones from many centuries, mixed together and repaired again and again. Listen for the trams below, the wind on the terrace, the footsteps of other visitors on the old paving... and notice how the city keeps moving, quietly, all around this ridge.